The Vampire Files Anthology

by P. N. Elrod

  Bobbi read him right. “You mean he’s already…?”

  “He called me about ten minutes ago.”

  Escott leaned forward. “Has he now? What was his purpose?”

  “He wanted to know everything I could tell him about Fleming. I said I didn’t know much, but he wouldn’t have bought that. From what’s been happening, I’m thinking he’s got other places to go for news.”

  “And what has been happening?”

  “You remember the Elvira?”

  Slick Morelli’s yacht. The scene of my murder. I remembered. Too well.

  “When it went up for sale, Kyler bought it.”

  We all exchanged uneasy looks. “Why?” I whispered.

  Gordy gave a minimal, but eloquent shrug. “He’s after you, kid. That’s all you need to know.”

  Bobbi wrapped her hands around one of mine. “Are we so positive that Kyler wants to kill Jack?”

  When I’d summarized things for Gordy, I’d mentioned the death of Kyler’s lieutenant, Hodge, but had been circumspect about the details. “Sorry, baby, but I’m stuck with it. He had a chance to call it all off tonight and didn’t, and the proof is the easy fifteen grand he gave up in the trying.”

  “Then what will you do?”

  Good question.

  “Perhaps a little information gathering of our own is in order,” Escott suggested thoughtfully. “Does Kyler still make his home at the Travis Hotel?”

  “He’s got the top floor all to himself,” said Gordy. “If you’re thinking on a visit, think again. He’s turned the place into a regular bank vault.”

  “What may one expect to find?”

  “Steel shutters on the windows, bulletproof glass, and an army of guys just looking for trouble to come their way.”

  “What does the management of the Travis think of their guest?”

  “What can they think? He owns it.”

  “Convenient for him, I daresay.”

  “You got an idea, Charles?” I asked.

  “No. But doubtless one will turn up. Some research is required first, beginning with what kind of questions Kyler had concerning you.”

  Gordy’s gaze turned inward to his memory and he gave us a succinct recounting of the conversation. The more I heard, the less I liked it.

  “He’s too damned interested in what happened aboard that yacht,” I said.

  “Not to mention what you’ve done since then,” Escott added soberly, letting all the implications sink in. “You haven’t exactly led a quiet life lately. You’ve been fairly invisible to the papers and the police, but there are numerous other places to go for information, and Kyler would have gleaned each of them clean by now. I don’t suppose you would consider allowing Kyler to go ahead and kill you?”

  “I hope you mean that the way I think you do.”

  “Certainly. Arrange things in your favor so that he thinks you’ve been eliminated. You’ve done it before.”

  “By accident, and I only got away with it because no one was looking for anything unusual.”

  “That’s for damn sure,” said Gordy, who had been a witness.

  “I can’t count on Kyler to fall for that. If he has an idea about what I am, he’ll know bullets won’t do the job.”

  “And you weren’t able to influence him, either,” Escott said, referring to the attempts I’d made to hypnotize Kyler the night before.

  “Nope.”

  “So forced persuasion or driving him insane may be eliminated as options.”

  “Yeah, though with him it would have been a short trip.” Great. Now I was making jokes about it. Maybe I was getting used to the situation. Or maybe it was the way everyone was watching me, as if I had the easy answer.

  Gordy shrugged again. “If you want any advice, I’d say change your name and get out of the country. That … or kill him first.”

  Bobbi’s hands tightened over mine.

  That was Gordy’s easy answer, and the one I’d expected to “hear. “Okay, say that I did it. I’d have to take care of his lieutenants, too, because they’d know who to blame and still be coming for me. Where does it stop?”

  No answer.

  “And I don’t know if I can do it. Not cold. Not just walking in on him. Could you?”

  His expression was unchanged, which made his reply that much more disturbing. “Yeah, kid, I could, but I don’t want a war. This has got to stay between you and him.”

  Escott gave me a long, steady look, which I did not return.

  “Does it bother you being back here again?” I asked, holding the door for Bobbi.

  “Back in the club or this part of it?”

  “This part.” I gestured around at what had once been Slick Morelli’s bedroom.

  “It’s just another place now that he’s gone.”

  Some of the furnishings were still intact: the bed, a few pictures on the walls, tables, but it had the impersonal look of a hotel. Bobbi ignored it all to push open a second door leading to a smaller bedroom and went in.

  “But this is where I’ll want to sleep,” she added.

  It, too, had been stripped down, but didn’t look quite so empty now that she was there. She put her bag on the dresser and let her overloaded purse drop next to it with a thud.

  “They’ve got you backed into a corner, haven’t they?”

  I watched as she began setting her things out. “What do you mean?”

  “First Kyler, now Charles and Gordy. It’s like they’re all pushing you into something you don’t want to do.”

  “But may have to.”

  “It’s already tearing you up. What happens to you afterward?”

  I had no answer for her, not having one for myself.

  She stopped unpacking and looked at me straight. “We can leave town like Gordy said. That would save everybody the most trouble.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “I don’t need to give you a list. Jack, you’ll have come up with enough reasons of your own by now.”

  “Yeah, baby, and every one of them has an argument against it. We could take off and disappear, but then what happens to Charles? Kyler’s after him as well. Say he decides to come along and we all start over some place else, we’ll always have to be looking over our shoulder. I do enough of that already.”

  “Okay, but can you live with the other thing?”

  “It wouldn’t be any problem for me to float right into Kyler’s steel-lined fort. He has no defense against that. If I know where he is, I can get to him. I’ve thought it all out.”

  “But…?”

  To kill. I’d done it before. Once by accident, while unused to my new strength, again, and quite deliberately for personal revenge, and again in a black moment of insanity So much had happened in so short a time that I was afraid of that blackness returning, perhaps for good.

  “But I think too much,” I concluded.

  “Just don’t shut me out, Jack. I’m in this with you. No matter what happens, you’re not alone.”

  I looked at her troubled face, remembering all the rough spots she’d pulled through, and felt something like a lump coming up in my throat. I drew her close, both of us clinging hard to one another and shaking a little. She started to speak, but I shushed her. “No more talk, sweetheart. I’m all talked out for now and running out of time. I just want to be with you while I can.”

  “Especially here?” she murmured. “Where we started?”

  “We started downstairs in the casino hallway,” I reminded her.

  “And ended up here. Where we first made love.”

  “Not ended, I hope.”

  “Never.”

  I kicked the door shut. “Gordy better not shoot the lock off this time.”

  We suffered no inconvenient interruptions, during or after. We were quiet and intense, both needing the reassurance of touch, not speech. For me the little room filled with the sound of Bobbi’s quickening breath and heartbeat and the susurrant whisper of my hands over her skin. As it
often did for me, time seemed to slow between one beat and the next, my own movements slowing to match. Our leisurely dance took us to her bed once more and with no less passion than we’d known the first time.

  I drew on her life, on all that she was and was willing to freely give. We drifted for ages, without thought or motion to disturb that perfection of sensation. When at last I pulled away enough to look down at her, she was shivering—not with cold or pain, she insisted, but from the aftermath of the pleasure.

  “Your eyes are all red,” she observed. We’d forgotten to shut off the light. “No, don’t turn away. I like it.”

  “You sure?”

  She chuckled. “My demon lover.”

  We settled against one another. Bobbi fell asleep in my arms; I stared at the ceiling and dreamed.

  Times like this were the toughest.

  Not that there was a lot of misery in my life, but now I would have given almost anything to be able to drop off to sleep—real sleep—with Bobbi and wake to see her in the morning sun. My condition gave me many advantages, but intertwined were restrictions that could never be ignored.

  One of them was immortality. Or the next closest thing to it.

  It sounds like a good idea, but what do you do in decades to come as your family and friends age and die while you stay ever the same? Life was so ephemeral—if not for me, then for everyone else. What would happen to Bobbi and me? We’d exchanged blood on many occasions. There was a slim chance she might change to be like me, but absolutely no guarantees, only equal amounts of hope and despair until the day she died.

  And what then, if I lost her forever?

  I held her, listening to the long sigh of her breath, to the fragile rhythm of her heart.

  I held her and ached with the awful loneliness that I had come to realize was special to my kind.

  I held her and could have wept from it.

  These were the tough times. When it’s the deepest part of midwinter night and you know you’ll never sleep again, it’s all too easy to fall into a bleak mood and think it’ll last forever. Tonight 1 was especially vulner able because I was contemplating another man’s death and felt the memory of my own stir in fretful sympathy.

  There wasn’t much I could do about it, not here and now.

  I faded away and floated clear of the sheets and blankets. The bed hardly creaked as my weight simply vanished and the covers caved in on the space my body had occupied. Bobbi lay undisturbed until after I reformed and bent to kiss her lightly on the temple. She smiled and snuggled more deeply into the pillows.

  Demon lover, indeed, I thought as I dressed, shut off the light, and silently glided out.

  Escott and Gordy were still in the office. Escott had turned up an ice bag and held it to his eye to bring down the swelling. The stacks of money were gone, replaced by coffee and sandwiches. The air was thick with cigarette smoke. The number of discarded butts in the desk ashtray indicated that they’d gone through at least one pack while I’d been saying good-bye to Bobbi.

  “Any more calls from Kyler?” I asked.

  Gordy answered. “No, but there’s a couple of cars covering the club that don’t belong out there. He knows what’s going on.”

  That was a hint I couldn’t ignore. “Okay, no sense dragging you into this more than necessary. I’ll make sure they see me leaving.”

  Escott put the ice bag down. “You’ve decided what to do?”

  “Yeah.” Then there was a long pause as they waited for me to go on, only I didn’t want to. “I’ll call later … let you know what happens.”

  “Do you wish some company?”

  I was tempted to say yes, but shook my head. Danger to him aside, something like this would have to be done alone. “Just keep an eye on Bobbi. Don’t let those goons come anywhere near her.”

  No more questions after that. None were needed. I took the steps downstairs slowly, as though I were going to my own execution, not Kyler’s.

  The kitchen was deserted, so I didn’t bother opening the door, and just seeped right through it. The outside air seemed harsher than before. Between the high black bulks of the buildings a gray slice of night sky pressed down upon me. The Nash was long gone, presumably parked in some safer spot than the club’s back alley.

  Covering the right-hand exit to the street was a black Ford. I studied it a moment and checked my immediate surroundings. It was dark enough that they probably hadn’t noticed how I’d left the club. I drew in a deep breath of sharp air and puffed it out again, producing a long plume of vapor, then wrapped up in the muffler and walked toward them. I halfway expected—and maybe hoped—to see the passenger window roll down and a gun to poke out. It would be so simple to mime taking a fatal shot and let them charge eagerly back to Kyler to report their success.

  But they weren’t about to make it that easy for me and they’d be too suspicious if I returned the favor by directly approaching them. As soon as my foot hit the sidewalk I turned south and moved away rapidly, the back of my neck prickling. After I crossed the street and kept going, their motor whined and caught. I glanced back. They were keeping pace some yards behind… maybe setting me up for a hit-and-run? Well, I’d been through that before and survived, though a repeat of the experience was nothing to look forward to. The second car pulled up behind them. Better and better; I wanted us all well away from the Nightcrawler before the party started.

  By the time I’d crossed another street to the next block they were ready to move in. I broke into a run, fast, but nothing the Ford couldn’t easily overtake. They let me get halfway down, then whipped past and stopped square in my path. The second car closed in behind.

  No cover presented itself. On my right was the brick face of a tall building, showing windows only, and those too high up for a normal man to break into. On the left was more of the same with a broad bare street between. They’d picked their spot well. I skidded to a stop and waited for them.

  The two men in the Ford were the first out. Their guns were ready and covered me while two more emerged from a familiar-looking Olds. The driver of that car knew me right away.

  “He’s the one,” he told the others. “Think you’re a smart-ass, don’t you?” He was still stinging from my successful con back at the Top Hat.

  I offered no opinion as he slapped me down for weapons. I was clean. It wouldn’t have made much sense to pack something only to have it taken away again. All he did find was a rather slim money belt that I’d thought to carry. It contained no money, though. In the event that I got caught away from my usual daylight sanctuaries, the narrow pockets of the belt were loaded with oilcloth-wrapped packets of my home earth. It was a sufficient quantity to keep the dreams at bay and allow me full rest. The man only recognized the belt for what it appeared to be and started to remove it.

  “Never mind that,” I said. “Let’s just get going.”

  He paused, holding his gun steady on my gut. “Tough guy,” he said, pretending to be impressed. Then I looked him full in the face and his sarcasm abruptly melted off. He automatically put some space between us.

  “Your boss still want to see me?” I prompted.

  That got him back on balance. “Yeah,” he said. “He’s been waiting all night to see to you personally.”

  He jerked his head toward the Olds. I was in no hurry and moved reluctantly in the right direction. Before I’d taken three steps, the rough murmur of a heavy motor drifted in on the wind. Another car was turning onto our street. Correction, it was a big paneled truck. Kyler’s men paused and two of them turned away from the glare of its headlights, their bodies shielding their drawn guns from obvious view. Our whole group must have looked odd, but not enough to inspire any investigation. Probably just as well. The truck pulled around the parked Olds, gears grinding.

  As it came even with us, it downshifted and the brakes suddenly squawked. The thing rolled another dozen feet, then stopped. The rear door was wide open, framing three men. All three were armed. The short one on the
end took quick aim and fired. The man next to me gave out with a wordless yell and ducked. He got off a return shot that went wild and had no time for a second. Something invisible knocked into his chest and he spun to the pavement.

  I dropped flat, eyes shut, and partially dematerialized. I didn’t care who saw. Explosions and shouts roared above and around me for what seemed like a very long time but couldn’t have been more than a few seconds. Ringing silence followed. I found myself solid once more, eyes blinking against the acrid smoke from their guns.

  The men from the truck were out and checking the four bodies that sprawled around me. One of Kyler’s men still moved, trying to crawl away. The small newcomer stood over him, taking precise aim at the back of his head. I stared and breathed in the sharp metallic warmth of the blood. I had to swallow hard to keep down the rising knot of bile in my throat. My flash thought that maybe Gordy had decided at the last moment to join in the war went away. None of these faces were familiar or friendly.

  The wounded man sensed something and twisted to look up. He froze, his eyebrows high and his eyes popping. It would have been comical except for all the blood.

  He started whimpering. “Please … I didn’t …”

  “Shut up, Vic,” said one of the newcomers. “Jerk never did have any spine. Get him inside.”

  While the short one kept me covered, Vic was lifted and quickly loaded into the truck. Another of Kyler’s men moaned and moved a little. We both noticed at the same time. One fast step and my guard was over him. Without hesitation, he pulled the trigger. The man’s body spasmed in time to the blast of the gun, then quivered a few times after the echoes faded, but that didn’t mean anything; he was dead.

  The other two came out to check on the noise. Neither of them seemed surprised or very upset that their friend’s action had taken away half of the guy’s head. This was business as usual as far as they were concerned.

  The guns were all pointed at me now.

  More sudden silence as the one who’d delivered the coup d’grace gestured for me to climb in the back of the truck. I was given no chance to do anything else. The other two each grabbed an arm and hoisted me up. I was dragged in. The doors slammed, shutting us into near darkness, and the driver got things moving. The total elapsed time of the whole business couldn’t have been more than forty seconds.